Domestic appliances that cool their contents, e.g., refrigerators and freezers, typically perform only a cooling function. For example, refrigerators cool their contents to below ambient temperatures, but above freezing temperatures, and freezers are intended to cool their contents to below freezing temperatures. However, these appliances typically do not provide any other treatment functions to further prepare the contents.
Often these contents may ultimately require some measure of heating before being consumed or receiving other additional treatment by another appliance. For example, frozen meals (i.e., TV dinners) need to be cooked completely before being consumed and this is typically accomplished by heating in a microwave oven or a conventional oven. Other food items, such as frozen meat, may require heating to be defrosted (e.g., in a microwave oven) before being cooked for consumption by still another method (e.g., a conventional oven or a grill). The commonality among these examples is that many such food items require heating from a different appliance before being consumed.
While kitchens today commonly include a range of appliances to perform numerous functions, such arrangements may not provide the most efficient use of a given amount of kitchen space to accomplish the desired tasks. Moreover, such arrangements may not be configured to accomplish such tasks most efficiently in the temporal sense. In other words, common domestic appliance arrangements may not provide the most efficient allocation of resources for the end user.